Community kitchen, garden idea brewing

GRAVENHURST - The main ingredient to success will be community support, but there is a new idea cooking up to empower local women.
Under the umbrella of the YWCA’s YW4Work project, Linda Birmingham has an idea to connect generations of women, share skills and a few laughs and hopefully inspire new businesses, independence and the entrepreneurial spirit.
As program manager and community relations manager for Chartwell’s Gravenhurst Manor, Birmingham recognized a great wealth of knowledge through the residents there. She brought the idea to YW4Work program lead and YWCA women’s community economic development project co-ordinator Laura Redman.
“As we talked it was like the perfect meeting of minds,” Redman said.
The concept, called Grannies4Gravenhurst, is to join senior residents with the younger female generations to teach some of those kitchen and life skills that are not as common today.
“This is an opportunity for women to share their combined wisdom around food, as well as an opportunity to create some healthy meals from the ground up to support feeding families,” Redman explained. “I’ve had women from this community (Gravenhurst) come up to me starving; this project will help teach them the value of healthy food and how it can be less expensive and go farther than the quick, easy (dinner) choices.”
Birmingham added that the Gravenhurst Trinity United Church has already donated a parcel of land to the project for a community garden, where participants will grow their own food to be used in the cooking sessions.
“(It’s) a women’s wisdom space that will lead into other opportunities around food training, needlework, crafts and visual arts,” Redman added. “Once this community of women is established, we can also begin to offer some professional training around life skills, financial literacy and food-handling certifications to support women into employment or self-employment.”
“We think this will be just ideal for some of those local, young women who are struggling to feed themselves or a family,” Birmingham said. “A lot of seniors really enjoy cooking and certainly have a lot of wisdom to share; a lot of them are skills that have been forgotten.
“It’s community building, it’s confidence building, it’s mentorship and really it’s an incredible opportunity,” she added, saying Savour Muskoka has also already teamed up with the project to help advise and lead the sessions as well as help teach about best gardening practices.
“And it’s not just about cooking or gardening, it’s about mental health as well,” Birmingham said, adding participants will learn about canning, making preserves and harvesting.
Birmingham is hoping to gauge local interest for participants, potential volunteers or supporters. She has a funding application out to the provincial government to help support the project and she is working on securing a proper kitchen to host the sessions. An online funding campaign has also started and people are asked to go to avivacommunityfund.org/ideas/acf16352 to vote for the project. The program with the most votes will get the financial backing and Birmingham said people can vote every day.
“This is the teach-a-man-to-fish principle,” Redman said. “It can work at so many levels.”